Question 1

Is Wuthering Heights a love story or a horror story?

Accepted Answer

It is both, simultaneously and inseparably, and the question of which it is has never been resolved to general satisfaction. Heathcliff and Catherine's love is one of the most intense in English fiction — 'I am Heathcliff,' Catherine says; 'He's more myself than I am' — but Heathcliff is also a violent, cruel man who abuses his wife Isabella, mistreats his own son Linton, degrades Hindley Earnshaw, seizes the properties of both families, and hangs Catherine's dog. The novel refuses the reader the option of a simple response: to love the love story, one must overlook or accept the violence; to condemn the violence, one must accept that it is inseparable from the love. Emily Brontë seems to have been entirely aware of this and to have intended the moral difficulty.

Question 2

Why is Heathcliff's racial identity ambiguous?

Accepted Answer

Heathcliff is described in the novel as 'dark' and as having the look of a 'gypsy,' and his origins are entirely unexplained: he is found on the streets of Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw, who brings him home as a child and names him Heathcliff. Liverpool in the nineteenth century was a major port of the slave trade, and many critics — especially postcolonial critics — have argued that Heathcliff's ambiguous racial identity is central to the novel's meaning: that he is a figure who has been excluded from English social life partly on racial grounds, and that his revenge against the Earnshaws and Lintons is partly a revenge for that exclusion. The novel is deliberately ambiguous about Heathcliff's origins, and Emily Brontë never explains where Mr. Earnshaw found him or who he was.

Question 3

What is the second generation plot in Wuthering Heights?

Accepted Answer

Wuthering Heights has two generations of story. The first generation is the love story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, which ends with Catherine's death after the birth of her daughter (also Catherine, called Cathy). The second generation follows the younger Cathy, Heathcliff's son Linton (born to Isabella after she escaped from Heathcliff), and Hindley's son Hareton. Heathcliff's plan is to use Linton to marry Cathy and thereby gain ownership of Thrushcross Grange, which he does — and then Linton dies. But Hareton Earnshaw — Hindley's son, whom Heathcliff has deliberately kept uneducated as an act of revenge — falls in love with Cathy, and she teaches him to read, and this relationship is the novel's redemptive element: an echo of the first generation's love story but with a different ending. Heathcliff dies at the novel's end, apparently haunted by Catherine, and Hareton and Cathy inherit everything.

Question 4

Is Wuthering Heights Gothic fiction?

Accepted Answer

Wuthering Heights is one of the defining texts of Victorian Gothic fiction, drawing on the Gothic tradition (wild landscape, ruined or decaying houses, uncanny presences, violent passions) while transforming it. The moors are the novel's central landscape and are treated as a kind of moral and psychological extension of the characters who inhabit them: the Heights and the Grange represent different attitudes to nature, class, and order, and the moors between them are the space where the normal rules of social life do not apply. The novel has been described as a Gothic novel, a romantic novel, a Yorkshire novel, a novel about class, and a novel about racial exclusion; it resists being definitively placed in any single category.

Wuthering Heights Reading Order

Complete Wuthering Heights Book List